Hi,

There is a new branch in svn (branches/jvmbackend) that contains support for 
compiling Pascal code into Java virtual machine bytecode. While it does not 
support all language constructs and while there are some differences in some 
features that are supported, in general the result is fairly close to "normal 
Pascal" you'd write.

Note however that this is a pure compiler port at this time. That means that 
while most of the language support is fairly complete, pretty much no standard 
Pascal units are available. For all practical intents and purposes there is 
only the system unit, and even that one misses many routines (including helpers 
required for basic functions such as read(ln)/write(ln), val, str, delete, pos, 
...).

On the other hand, a unit that contains the entire public interface of the JDK 
1.5 is available. Over time, it should be possible to provide most of the 
standard functionality of the system unit (and other units) implemented on top 
of that unit, or rewritten in Pascal code that does not depend on untyped 
pointer accesses.

Download information, usage information etc is available at 
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_JVM

Regarding Android: the compiler and the system unit both use a bunch of 
standard functionality from the JDK to implement various features. So Android 
support would probably require quite a bit of extra work. I have not looked 
into that.

Enjoy!


Jonas

PS: no, this does not mean that FPC development from now on will only, or even 
primarily, focus on managed language support. And the infrastructure added for 
JVM support will make an LLVM port a lot more feasible in the future, because 
there is now a code generator layer that uses high level type 
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